Military

There’s good news for the Fairbanks business community. The secretary of the Air Force called Alaska’s congressional delegation to announce that Eielson Air Force Base is the only candidate selected to house two squadrons of F-35 fighter planes. The final decision won’t be until the fall of 2015, after a study of the environmental Impact, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski says she’s confident.

“Eielson clearly is the front-runner. There was no reasonable alternative which was identified, they moved straight to the preferred alternative, which I think is really quite compelling for Eielson,” Murkowski says.

The Air Force cited Eielson’s strategic position on the globe, the wide-open air space and training range, and the support of the local community. Sen. Mark Begich says he expects the 48 planes will bring several hundred jobs and, all told, some 2,000 people, including family members. Begich gave credit to the Tiger Team, the Fairbanks and Interior leaders who promote Eielson.

“They came out in droves. They had information, they had data. They went to every public hearing. They made sure the Department of Defense, the Pentagon heard from Alaskans first-hand why this base location in Alaska was the right decision, especially at Eielson.”

The F35A is a single-seat, single-engine fighter with stealth technology that can also carry heavy bombs.

The Lance Drive bomb mystery has been solved.

Explosives found last week at the end of Lance Drive in Sitka turned out to be no longer dangerous — in fact, bomb experts believe that they had already detonated underground years ago.

The Sitka fire department called in a military bomb squad from Ft. Richardson to assist with the case.

Last Thursday, a Lance Drive homeowner called in officials after discovering strange wires sticking out of the ground where he was building a rock wall. Authorities briefly evacuated neighboring residents and closed Sawmill Creek Road to traffic.

By Saturday, the investigating team cleared the area and cut down an 80-foot spruce tree adjacent to the wires. Unearthing what turned out to be a 30-year-old fuse, the team followed the fuse wire down eight feet to find a hollowed-out cavern, assistant fire chief Al Stevens said on Monday.

Buried dynamite had exploded years ago, creating the cavern, but the TNT was so tightly packed in the surrounding sand, it had not caused an explosion above ground. And the fuse, or detonation cord, had never burned.

Officials suspect the cache of dynamite was left over from an abandoned roadworks project designed to connect Lance Drive to Sawmill Creek Road. The project was halted after city staff determined it was too dangerous to create an intersection on that particular blind curve of Sawmill Creek Road.

Stevens said in all of his years on the job, he had never come across anything like the underground explosion site. He added that it was likely the felled spruce tree would have eventually toppled on adjacent homes as it was standing atop a hollow mound.

A museum in Petersburg is reaching out to try and identify hundreds of World War Two era photos of people from central Southeast Alaska. The images are being archived at Petersburg’s Clausen Museum and may include photos of people from Wrangell, Kake and other remote communities.

Volunteers and paid workers have scanned in an estimated 2,500 images, mostly negatives, of residents and visitors who came though Petersburg in 1942, or used the waterfront.

Kathy Pool is working with the museum on the World War II Coast Guard photo identification project.

“These photos were taken by Mary Allen in January and February of 1942 after Pearl Harbor in the previous month,” Pool said. “We were slapped with new regulations limiting who was allowed down along the waterfront in Petersburg and any other coastal town in Alaska.”

One of those requirements was a photo ID card issued by the Coast Guard for anyone coming and going on the waterfront and that’s where these photos come in.

“The people had to supply three passport photos to the Coast Guard and be fingerprinted and give a physical description and were issued these cards that they had to have on their person when they went to the cannery to work or had to go to the fuel dock and fuel their boat or fishermen coming over from Kake to sell fish.”

The negatives show faces and torsos of 1,508 different people. Pool said some tried out different poses or different outfits on different days.

“They were taking advantage of Mary having her equipment set up in a studio and they’d come after work in their work clothes and get their ID photo taken that they needed for their Coast Guard identification card. But they’d go home maybe the next day they’d show back up in instead of work clothes maybe a coat and tie. The women instead of in their head scarves cause they’d been working in the cannery they show up very well coifed in makeup and nice clothes and sit for a nice photograph.”

Allen died just three years later in 1945 and the images were kept in a local building until that was torn down. The negatives were rescued and given to the museum. Local historian Chris Lando identified many of the photos in the 1970s. Still there are images of 603 people that no one’s been able to identify yet. Pool thinks some may be from Kake, Wrangell and possibly Angoon and Hoonah. Some are already up on the Clausen Museum’s facebook page.

Pool and several volunteers have been digitizing the images and archiving them. They’ll all ultimately end up online and available for family members. The museum also plans to send flash drives with the unknown images to neighboring communities and ask for help in IDing the photos.

Clausen director Sue McCallum said the project was funded by a collections management grant from the statewide organization Museums Alaska.

“It’s the first year that they’ve had these grants and we were awarded $6,000 from them. Because of the urgency of this project of people who are able to identify these images are aging very rapidly and some are quite old like in their 80s. And so we’re hoping not to lose those resources, to identify the people.”

Another private donation of $1,000 helped buy a new computer to hold the digital images.

Pool said it’s a unique project.

“1,500 photos of all ages of people, age 15-84, men and women, the diversity of the ethnic backgrounds, this is a real unique slice of life here,” she said. “What a snapshot, what a gift we have.”

Pool hopes to do some public slide shows in Petersburg in August and will make house calls to show the images to anyone who can help identify people. She’ll also visit neighboring communities if needed.

A six-person seiner taking on water near Ketchikan Friday morning was helped out by U.S. Coast Guard personnel, and escorted back to port.

According to the Coast Guard, a call for help was received from the F/V Vernon, reporting about a foot of water in the engine room. Coast Guard Sector Juneau issued a marine information broadcast, and deployed two rescue boats from Station Ketchikan.

Coast Guard teams used four dewatering pumps to control the flooding, and later escorted the 65-foot purse seiner back to Ketchikan.

The cause of the flooding is under investigation.

Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday named former Coast Guard commandant Robert J. Papp Jr. as special representative to the Arctic. Kerry created the new position to elevate Arctic issues in America’s foreign policy and national security strategy as the U.S. prepares to assume the chair of the Arctic Council.

Papp was head of the Coast Guard from 2010 until he retired in May. Both Alaska senators praised the appointment and said Papp has substantial experience in the region.  Papp says he’s seen the changing Arctic first-hand. When he was new to the service, in July 1976, he was sent in a helicopter to look for a way to get a Coast Guard cutter from Nome to the North Slope.

“I was amazed that, first of all, we didn’t find any leads in the ice going through the Bering Strait,” he said in a 2012 address. “And as we landed in Kotzebue, as I looked out across the water, all I could see was ice. Ice as far as I could see.”

Fast-forward three decades. As commandant, he decided to go back to Kotzebue.

“As we were landing, I looked out as far as I could see, and I saw no ice,” Papp said. “Same time of the year, 34 years later, no ice.”

Kerry also announced the appointment of former Alaska Lt. Governor Fran Ulmer as Special Advisor on Arctic Science and Policy. Ulmer says it will be in addition to her current post, as chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.

“But this role is a slight expansion of that in that it will focus on some of the broader Arctic Policy issues that are specific to the 2015-2017 Arctic Council chair rotation,” Ulmer says.

Ulmer says it’s important for Alaskans to have an opportunity to engage with the Arctic Council.

“If you look at what has been done recently (on the Council) in terms of search and rescue, and oil spill response and research in ocean acidification and the health of marine mammals, these things are important regionally, nationally, locally, globally,” she says.

Secretary Kerry says Papp plans to visit Alaska soon to consult with policymakers there.

Canada’s Coast Guard is suffering from crossed wires at their only manned field station in the Arctic.

The CBC reports that some radio transmissions aren’t making it through to the Coast Guard office in the northeastern province of Nunavut because of a lag in their new software system.

This is only the second summer that the Nunavut office has handled distress calls from across the Arctic. A field station near the popular Northwest Passage shut down in 2012 due to budget constraints.

So far, no sailors have been affected by the radio glitch, according to the president of the union for Canadian Coast Guard communications officers. Brad Stroud told the CBC that the system could be fixed within the week. In the meantime, he suggests that mariners call Canada’s central search and rescue office if they run into trouble.